


white elephant

by Tridraconeus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Skeletons, bad reunions, post corroded man, sassy dead galia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 18:46:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11652501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tridraconeus/pseuds/Tridraconeus
Summary: A possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of.Or, Billie Lurk receives the heart of a living thing.





	white elephant

**Author's Note:**

> me, breathing in: I LOVE GALIA FLEET.

Billie slunk down into the wreckage of the slaughterhouse, hugging onto the walls and skirting the rafters.

She had a lead on Daud. More importantly, she had a lead on something else; something that would make getting to Daud that much easier. The days blended into weeks and finally brought her right back to the place she thought that she’d left for good those balmy days on the Dreadful Wale.

_Dunwall_. And more than that, an old whale slaughterhouse. The sight of whaling masks hung on pegs was an ironic sting that she ignored with a mixture of grit and guilt. There was dried blood on the steel floor and a large vat with charred black lines dragging up the side, around the rim, and her intuition told her to venture closer. The lip came up to her chest and she steeled herself for the sucking, disgusting layer of muck at the bottom before she hopped over and inside. All in all it wasn’t too bad. She’d had worse when she ran with Daud. It came up to the tops of her ankles and clung to her boots. She took a step—there was a characteristic crunch of bone. Billie glanced down into the sticky mess and only training kept her from lurching back.

A skull grinned back up at her. Billie moved her foot off of the caved-in section that she’d caused. Respect for the dead was something she’d had, if not acted on, and besides it didn’t feel proper somehow. She cast her eyes around for her quarry and direly hoped that she hadn’t dropped herself into a pit of dark, disgusting residue for nothing.

There, under the sludge. The blade’s hilt stuck out of a bleached ribcage, and she tugged it out. The entire thing shifted and upset the muck to reveal something red, pulsating like a skinned rat between the ribs. Against her better nature, she knelt and scooped it up, straightened and examined it.

The thing s _poke_. It beat harder, thudding against the cage of her fingers.

“Billie Lurk. You clawed your way out of the mud, and have wet the ground with the blood of many.”

In surprise, Billie dropped the pulsing thing. It landed with a dull splash in the viscous muck and the beat slowed to nothing but a crawl. After some contemplation, she picked it up again. It laid warm and beating slowly in her hand. Billie’s throat had closed at the thing’s words. It wasn’t _natural_. It was a warm, beating heart wired up with copper and glass, gears, tapping into the Void itself and whispering secrets to her. Even worse, she recognized the voice. The position of it couldn’t be a coincidence, and with the slightest flutter of her fingers against the heart she pointed it at the bones. The heart knew what it was being asked to do, and the rough voice started in Billie’s ears again. She was reminded of the crying of gulls, the scrape of waves along the stones at Dunwall.  

“This place is a grave to many. Whales, men, and Galia Fleet.”

Billie lowered the heart and let it dangle at her side, stomach twisting with the gravity of what it meant to accept and use this… gift. Galia, when she was alive, never seemed to like Billie much. She was hotheaded, tended to run towards disaster, and was recklessly ambitious with the blooming skill to back it up. She was loud with her wants. She was brazen, and just as addicted to Daud’s power as the rest of them.

Billie had pegged her as the type to live hard, die fast, and regret none of it. Finding herself correct was oddly disappointing. If Galia were alive, she would be thirty five and a valuable ally no matter how temperamental. Briefly, Billie considered driving her blade into the leathery weight of it; dashing it back into the muck and leaving that part of her past behind. Without any more second thoughts Billie stowed the sharp-edged thing under her coat, sheathed the blade, and made her way out of the slaughterhouse.

*

Billie examined Galia’s heart more once she was in her own safehouse. It was surprisingly heavy, for one. It beat harder when she held it and seemed to be always on the precipice of spilling someone’s dirty secrets.

In a way, Billie figured that Galia hadn’t changed at all.

“Galia? Can you hear me?” It was on a whim, and her voice was perhaps softer than she’d meant. It would be a far cry to say it was honeyed with sympathy, but perhaps she did feel bad for Galia. To be trapped like this seemed a rather disproportionate punishment for witchcraft. The Void never was all that kind to its devotees, they all knew that well enough.

“I can hear.” One, two, three strong pulses in her hand. There was a sheen of red over the heart and Billie wiped it away with her sleeve, humming in surprise as the fluid soaked into her sleeve and then into nothing. More beaded out and covered the pinkness again. This time, Billie left it. A self-contained carnage was not her issue and she had the feeling that Galia would not appreciate the care. She hadn’t when she was alive, she wouldn’t when she was dead.

“You can see things in the Void?”

Acerbic as ever, even in death, Galia’s voice rose from the heart. “I see many things.”

“What can you tell me?”

The heart beat faster. “Something big is coming. There will be a cataclysm, and the world will shake and twist. You will be at the center.” In Galia’s voice, such a calm proclamation sounded wrong. “You have quite the flair for the dramatic, Billie.” There it was. Galia, as always, rubbing salt into open wounds. If they were scabbed, opening them up again. Wretched, sadistic beast. Billie huffed and squeezed the heart. Galia fell silent and so Billie tucked the heart back into her coat, took it off, and tried to get some sleep. The pulsing beat, unnaturally slow, kept her company all through the night.

*

In the morning, the heart found its way into her hand again and she padded down the main street curiously seeing what she could get out of it.

_Names_ , for one, but they were all wrong and from her past.

“Rinaldo would laugh at her. Do you see how she imitates Serkonan fashion? She is from a wealthy family,” about a young noblewoman in flouncing lace and a high collar.

“Do you remember when Devon fell on his own sword? The blade was sharp. He took good care of it.” A man of the City Watch, passed out drunk in an alley. Galia was speaking in riddles and half-truths, but Billie understood.

“Christopher cried and screamed as they took him from his family. The Bond made him forget, but seeing a golden mask made him seize up until the day he died.” Overseers, stationed at a street corner and staring at the crowded streets—hounds, unleashed but sitting obediently and panting. Billie kept her head down and moved on.

“He has Matteo’s eyes. He has killed for money before, and does not like it. But he is good at it.” It was a man, in his twenties perhaps, his legs neatly crossed at an outdoors table. He was chatting and smiling with another man sitting across from him, a pouch of what Billie knew from the lumpiness of it was coin under his chair.

“He misses it. His heart aches for the Void.” A man, in his late thirties. He had a thin and scruffy beard and sandy blond hair that fell to his neck, tattoos crawling up his liberally freckled arms. Silver lines of scars covered what she could see of him. Billie stopped stock-still, the heart clutched in her fist. She _knew_ him.

She tucked the heart back inside her coat and, without a second thought, started tailing a memory from her past. 

**Author's Note:**

> comments welcomed


End file.
